I'm not sure how many hockey fans are out there reading this but the Montreal Canadiens are in a unique position. They came into the playoffs ranked 8th (just qualifying) and came back from 3-1 series deficit to oust the number one ranked Washington Capitals. Last night they just tied the series 2-2 against the defending Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins. I have no shame in saying that I have jumped on the Canadiens bandwagon. For some reason that phrase went through my mind as they defeated the Penguins and I was reminded of my criticism of 'academic bandwagonry' in my letter below. I thought to myself "Yes, sports teams is where bandwagon jumping belongs." However, it is sports fans that are by far more loyal to their teams than academics are to their theories/theologies. And despite some resistance by the folk at AUFS it is hard to deny that academic work will always be guided by some larger trends and 'bandwagons'. But perhaps there are yet to be some theories/theologies or (dead) 
I never thought Yoder would make the run that he has (damn pacifist puts up a good fight). So whose big foam finger have you been hiding? Who are you willing to wear a rally cap for at the cost of your intellectual capital?
Me? I'm waiting for a'Kempis to get called up from the minors. Brother Lawrence may be bush league but he's all heart. And the charismatics, I hear their goalie is on fire.
Late roster addition - Schleiermacher may be a cagey veteran that's been overlooked as well.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Put on Your Rally Caps
Monday, May 03, 2010
An Open Letter to An und fur sich
Given some of the comments in Anthony Paul Smith's recent post over at an und fur sich I thought it might be a good time to put this up.
As I have discussed in an earlier post I have returned to the theo-philosophical blogosphere. In my time off I have discovered the meaning of life . . . no really. Life is meant to be an act of worship (I'll leave how I understand that dangling for now). I am, God help me, actually trying to have this inform my thought and actions. So I have returned to reading many of my old favourites and in many instances I find great insight and challenge in their posts. In my year off I have seen an und fur sich become quite a little powerhouse blog. The contributors have accomplished high academic achievement and are beginning a promising publishing career. In addition to this they are working primarily in an area of great personal interest to me which is a rigorous engagement with biblical/theological tradition and contemporary (broadly) European philosophy. I linked to Adam K and Anthony P S's forthcoming works and read the brief descriptions on Amazon (I do not know how they personally feel about them).
An excerpt from Adam's description reads,
This is a new theory of the atonement, showing that the Christian account of salvation can only fully make sense if approached from a social-political angle.
Anthony's description reads,
This volume brings together a vanguard of scholars to ask what comes after the postsecular and the postmodern - that is, what is Continental philosophy of religion now? . . . The essays do not propose a new orthodoxy but set the stage for new debates by reclaiming a practice of philosophy of religion that recovers and draws on the insights of a distinctly modern tradition of Continental philosophy, confronts the challenge of rethinking the secular in the light of the postsecular event, and calls for a move from strictly critical to speculative thought in order to experiment with what philosophy can do.
These descriptions as well as the sites general academic engagement raise many questions for me as I return to reading and reflecting on them. I am interested in hearing Adam and Anthony and anyone else at aufs speak about the driving/compelling motivation of their projects (speaking more broadly then just their posts and publications). To me these descriptions and many of the posts imply the themes of production and speed, themes inherent to the academic process generally. We always need to be thinking of what is next and what is new (even if that means 'recovering' what has been neglected or forgotten). This is a pervasive phenomenon, throwing new at the market and seeing what will catch. I cannot actually imagine that there is a 'new' theory of the atonement out there and if there is then I cannot imagine it is true (but I will not stake my reputation on that statement). Actually as I think about it I am not sure the atonement can be theorized at all! And I read Anthony's description as a response to the growing trend of dissatisfaction with movements like RadOx (of course it is larger than that) which continues to strike me as academic bandwagonry (Let's get on board with Derrida then push him off, let's get on board with Milbank then push him off, let's get on board with Zizek and then . . . ). I know it is all more subtle and sophisticated than this but it is hard to deny this in academic 'progress' . . . until the renaissance of Derrida or Neo-postmodernism . . . oh the things we have forgotten and misunderstood!).
I am also quite sure that the hope of the folk at aufs is not simply to feed the academic machine (though I know that is part of professional development and advancement) and so I want invite you to speak about both your motivation and their hopes, to what end is your overall striving aimed and why do you think this form will facilitate that. Or do you have any aspirations that are not professionally driven. And I would ask you do this in a spirit of openness in a way that does not reflect the expectations of the academic/intellectual life. I am not asking you to defend anything (my above statements where not meant to be criticisms just reminders of a larger issue that spurred this post). I am not concerned that you sound rigorous and robust and all those other intellectually driven adjectives. I just want to hear from you because as far as I know I respect and even admire you and what they seem to be trying to do (and of course more than a little jealous of where you are and where I am not). But the problem is that I am not sure just what you are trying to do because I see it is all so shrouded in the mist of academic/intellectual protocol.
I know that in a sense this is a very narrow minded invitation and naive and perhaps it does not deserve a response. But I simply cannot shake the nagging question of why. Is there a hope for a better humanity in all this? Is there a belief in the pursuit of truth? Is there an attempt to honour God? Is this simply a personal preference, disposition or pleasure? Is this the result of chain of circumstance? A neurotic or compulsive conclusion to family and environmental upbringing? Is this the adventurers thrill of exploring the unknown? Addiction to thought? I am not kidding here I really would like to know. As I near as I can figure out at this time I pursued these things initially out of a response to God as I knew God manifested in the forms that seemed to come most naturally to me and in time there was increase of personal drive for achievement and status as well as a continued pleasure/obsession in the process (I have yet to uncover the family baggage that has played into all this other than this sort of pursuit affords me the opportunity to be less social).
You (and heck, anyone else reading this) are welcome to respond here or at your own site.You are of course welcome to ignore this . . . no offence. But I do find these communities helpful and at times even inspiring and so I ask you not pass over this invitation too lightly.
So to recap. I am drawn (uneasily) to aufs in the same manner that I am drawn (uneasily at times) to their interests. In the interest of understanding myself (I cannot always understand why I give it such value but I cannot help from partaking either) and your project(s) I would like hear about how you came to the place they find themselves, why the persist in it, and where they hope it leads (other than having the future fuck you! . . . although they can unpack that for me too if they want).
PS
After sitting with this post for a little while (as well as receiving courage and clarity from Mark Manolopoulos at Church and PoMo) I would have to say that I still pursue many of the same interests for pleasure, an adventurers pleasure that endures obstacles and hardships (and impenetrable texts) in the nagging belief that there may be something beautiful on the other side. And in honesty I still pursue these interests because I believe in some manner I can a better grasp or gain advantage in (for better or worse) the world around me.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Kill the Postmodern Story . . . But Let Postmodernism Live
I don't have much issue in speaking of postmodernism as a legitimate cultural/intellectual expression (though D. W. Congdon may disagree). I have a difficulty denying the crisis of stable representation and meaning across disciplines as significant 'shift' of some sorts. What I am coming to suspect is that it may in fact be the postmodern story that is the lie in all this. I can remember about ten years ago sitting in an undergraduate class on the sociology of religion learning about the new postmodern reality with its 'incredulity towards metanarratives' and its fragmenting into local, tribal stories. Since then I have heard that story recounted innumerable times in the service of various church related often 'emergent' projects. It has become the default preface in any attempt of the 'new'.
It seems clear to me now, made increasingly clear through writers like Zizek, that the Story of capitalism only grew stronger and incarnated or birthed or abducted the postmodern story as a mode of infinite market production. As quickly as there was any possible life to the postmodern story it was as quickly enveloped into the market. The Master Signifier of the Market has now been able to hide behind the multiplicity of the many expressions all of which offer no true alternative to the current economic model. The postmodern story it seems to be one initiator in this ongoing production.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
A Nietzschean Call to Worship?
In both Milbank's Theology and Social Theory as well as David B. Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite (though I can't find the reference right now) it is stated that "post-Nietzschean social theory suggests the practical inescapably of worship." Does anyone know who or what stream of thought is being referred to? I don't think either authors offer specific footnotes at that point.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Understanding the Gendered Jesus - Part 2; Graham Ward's Christ and Culture
Preface to Theology and Gendered Ministry
Understanding the Gendered Jesus - Part 1; Graham Ward's Cities of God
Having outlined the theological significance of Jesus’ body Ward, in his chapter “Divinity and Sexual Difference,” looks more specifically at the implications of his theological context of gender differences. Ward guides his discussion with the work of Luce Irigaray whose primary focus in the relationship between religion and gender is the existence of difference, space and desire. To maintain that Christ was humanly only as a man among other men forecloses difference, space and desire (which requires two) and demands that women must identify with the masculine gender for salvation. Difference must be maintained in gender because “sexual difference seems to me to assure the limits of being human which allows space for the divine.”[1] If Christ is the body of salvation then Jesus must somehow be more than just masculine. Some have argued that Irigaray’s position returns to a biological essentialism of heterosexual difference. Ward rejects this saying that her framing of sexual difference between the role of the phallus and two lips of the vagina is symbolic noting that they “do not necessarily map into bodies possessing male and female genitalia.”[2] Irigaray then looks to the body of Christ with the knowledge that it may contain more maleness. She finds that “there appears, in the form of a wound (his side), the place that, in women, is naturally open.”[3] It is within Christ himself that sexual difference may be maintained in particular contexts. And why is sexual difference important? In the Bible it is in the space of separation, difference and desire that creation and redemption occurs. “Desire is both the creator and the creation of space. Only where there is space, where there is distance, where there is difference, can there be love that desires, that draws, that seeks participation. . . . In the beginning God created by a process of separation.”[4]
This drawing into intimate relationship and the act of creation is not dissolution of the self. The space must be maintained and not foreclosed as the logic of patriarchy had it. In this space “we” emerge knowing more fully both “you” and “I.” There are two important post-resurrection stories that illustrate this. In John’s Gospel Mary encounters Jesus, but does not recognize him. Ward frames the encounter as heterosexual and one of desire. As Jesus calls her name she is drawn into desire and recognizes the partner in the space (Rabboni!). The recognition of this space prompts an immediate response and she draws into an intimate embrace with Jesus. Jesus tells her not to cling to him, the space must not be foreclosed, because he must return to God for this space to be inscribed in their faith. The other encounter is Thomas and Jesus. Thomas is the opposite of Mary. He is distant, isolating himself from the possibility of intimate space. Jesus must come to him and say reach out your hand and put it into my side. Place your hand in the place, that, in women, is naturally open. Here in this space there is also revelatory recognition, My Lord and my God! Here we have a ‘homosexual’ encounter in which the space of sexual difference is still able to be created. In both these examples sexual difference is created, regardless of biology. Wards states that “there is no theology of sexual difference, then, only the production of sexual difference in a theological relation. The encounter with Christ installs both the difference and its erotic form, its sexuate nature.”[5]
All relationships then produce sexual difference and carry an erotic nature (economy of desire). Theologically then we must think carefully through what it means to relate in Christ. “A body is, if you like, always in transit, always exceeding its significance or transgressing the limits of what appears. . . . The body exists fluidly in a number of operations between reception and response, between degrees of desire / repulsion, recognition / misrecognition, and passivity / activity.”[6] The body cannot be confined and reduced, it is in this continual negotiation that creation, love and salvation occurs. Gender is an expression of difference acting out within our various relationships in the body of Christ.
Ward offers a substantially different framework for understanding gender. Most scientific (and theological) approaches to the study of gender attempt to ultimately foreclose categories; to confine, dissect and analyze. This leaves individuals and groups working with prescriptive categories that do not apply to everyone and are often unjust in their relationship to other social groups. Ward does not discard biology as the body remains the primary site of meaning. It is, however, in the ongoing reality of relationships, of space, that allows people’s experience to be fully gendered, fully human.
[1] Christ and Culture, 139.
[2] Ibid., 139-40.
[3] Ibid., 140.
[4] Ibid., 145.
[5] Ibid., 154.
[6] Ibid., 157.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Understanding the Gendered Jesus - Part 1; Graham Ward's Cities of God
The theological paradigm of gender that I am adopting is taken directly from the work of Graham Ward in his books Cities of God and Christ and Culture.[1] Ward’s chapter “The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ” in Cities of God outlines his particular understanding of the gendered Jesus. In this chapter Ward finds in the Gospels the instability of Jesus’ gender. From birth Jesus appears to issue from promise and not from copulation. Jesus comes from virgin flesh and the line of Joseph. In medical terms the male Jesus who is circumcised (we assume his biology is confirmed here) issues from the XX chromosomal femaleness of his mother. Through his life the body of Jesus exhibits unusual expressions. “This man can walk on water. This man can sweat blood. This man can bring life. This man can multiply material so that five thousand are fed from a few loaves and fish. This man can heal by touch; and not just heal but create – wine from water, the eyes of the man born blind, the ear of the
At the crucifixion Jesus’ body is objectified, degendered, displaced as it is acted upon as meat and not human. But that is only in relation to the structural powers of law. Theologically the body is still displaced, distanced, but it is also gendered in the feminine as mother. The pierced side of Jesus issues blood and water birthing the church. In the eucharistic body we are joined through taking in Christ. In the crucified body we are dispelled from the side of Christ. Ward draws great significance for us as we are caught up in these movements. Ward is worth commenting in full here,
At the resurrection Christ’s body is raised corporeal but exhibits itself as even more unstable then in his prior life. He is now able to disappear, hide his identity and walk through walls. This increased instability reinforces to us that Christ’s identity and perhaps the identity of bodies in general cannot be finally determined, they keep their mystery and are able to offer revelation from that place.[6] Ward writes that,
With the ascension Jesus’ body receives its final displacement. Ward is quick to point out though “that displacement is not the erasure but the expansion of the body.”[8] In many ways it is Paul who is our interpreter of the ascended body of Christ when he writes in Colossians that the Church is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. “The final displacement of the gendered body of Jesus Christ, always aporetic and transgressing boundaries, is the multigendered body of the Church.”[9] As the crucifixion is turned onto its head as an event of birthing so to the ascending of Christ, Christ ‘leaving,’ is a creating of space for the divine-human relationship which Ward states clearing as re-establishing,
[1] Graham Ward, Cities of God (
[2] Cities of God, 100.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 103.
[5] Ibid., 106.
[6] Ibid., 109.
[7] Ibid., 111.
[8] Ibid., 112.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 113.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
The End of Theory (as the Goal of its Beginning)
In my second year of college likely in winter (though seasons held little relevance in my basement apartment with its single subterranean window funneling indirect light) I sat at my study table in my bedroom. The memory now is void of my initial purposes. I remember simply looking forward when out of the corner of my eye I saw something fall. Perhaps it was something hanging on the wall or leaning somewhere on my desk. Nothing immediately perceptible caused that object to fall. In my mind it just fell. The only sense I could make of it at the time was the phrase, "everything is moving". This was long before I understood the significance of movement in the work of theory and philosophy.
Of course from an atomic level this statement makes perfect sense as even a dead or inanimate object continues to "move". Orthodox theology (as well as deists I suppose) also has had no difficulty in its positing of an Unmoved Mover who has set the world in motion. I am encountering more and more discussion around the question of movement and source, particularly in terms of the theoretical explanation of or impact on society. How has change happened and how can change happen. Hollywood has resolved this in much the same manner that most theoretical or religious thought has. The change comes from the miraculous "outside" source or from some hitherto unknown "inside" source. Appealing to any "outside" source remains highly prone to suspicion. What good is rigorous critique if the impassible "outside" knocks our house of cards down with a single stroke.
Very well, let's remain on the inside. I am tempted to ask where the currency and origins of the immanent sources being applied to are from in posts at Rough Theory and Now-Times but that tends to lead towards an impasse. I suppose it can remain un-addressed in many contexts. I proceed with some hesitation given a recent comment NP made on her own post. I am not an expert in their field of study but I enter in as someone concerned with the questions being asked and a belief that truly inter-disciplinary discussion (as should reflect the best of blogging) would be helpful.
What troubles me in their posts is the notion that substantive social change, transformation (group or individual), can come as the reslut of public awareness or the formation of "critical thinking". These are not insignificant pursuits, do not get me wrong (why else am I carrying the illusion that someone may be reading this). I am also not reaching for the miraculous "outside" though I also have no essential problem with it. And I can most certainly sympathize with talk about a "moral, first person reflection" if I understand that correctly. And while I am qualifying myself here I should also mention that I can recognize that "change" certainly occurs through the process I just criticized. However, I would be careful before I viewed these changes as being qualitatively different than a recent advertisement I saw. Turn your change into cash. It was pasted on a machine in which you dumped your spare change in a grate in order to receive your money back in higher denominations (at a cost of course). The end result is positive but not substantively different in the larger play of relations.
I am moving towards the position that theory and moral formation is only as good as it postures the individual towards what I can only describe at this point as death. As I observed in my early college days their is movement to be observed and engaged but our participation in it remains elusive to much theoretical grasping. Stay tuned for more on "death" (see Ralph Stanley on IndieVision for now).
